Bankrupt Education
The Decline of Liberal Education in Canada

By Peter C. Emberley and Waller R. Newell
Directors, The Centre for Liberal Education and Public Affairs
Carleton University

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Canada has seen exhaustive experimentation in school curricula and teaching methods in the last three decades. The questioning and innovations in education relfect the perceptions that the school system is out of step with the times and unclear about its goals. Peter C. Emberley and Waller R. Newell make a provocative contribution to the current debate about education. The authors believe they express views held by Canadians who expect educators to promote literacy, convey principles of justice, and develop moral character, but who find that none of these objectives are being met in the current system.

Taking as its point of departure the Ontario government's destreaming and 'transition years' initiatives, Bankrupt Education discusses the principles involved in the new curriculum, and deals with the Smith Report and the economic and political pressures being put on universities. The incongruity between the new education and the requirements of citizenship in a liberal democracy is the dominant theme of the discussion. Behind the current debate, the authors argue, lies the urgent need to reconsider the classical tradition of liberal education.

In the tradition of Hilda Beatby's So Little for the Mind, Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, and E. D. Hirsch Jr.'s Cultural Literacy, Bankrupt Edcuation analyses what ails education today, what constitutes excellence in education, and how this ideal can be realized. It is essential reading for parents, teachers, administrators, policy-makers, and all those concerned about the crisis in modern education.

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Reviews

“Bankrupt Education is characterized by a calm passion that comes from serious reflection on the plight of popular education today in schools and universities. It is bound to be disputed by all the right people: fanatics, technocrats, the devout votaries of strange doctrines in Ed. Psych. Bankrupt Education will take its rightful place beside The Great Brain Robbery and So Little for the Mind as a protest against the institutionalized ignorance and wilful stupidity of professional educators.”

Barry Cooper,
The University of Calgary

“THE CLOSING OF THE CANADIAN MIND...Emberley and Newell predict schools will turn out students who can adapt to a variety of jobs but have no sense of their place in the larger world, who base their behaviour on fashionable notions of what is right instead of deeply held convictions, and whose sense of justice is to avoid giving offense. Bankrupt Education is a call to arms, a warning that Canadian education is being eroded by reformers who believe its liberal tradition is elitist, sexist and racist.”

Wendy Warburton,
The Ottawa Citizen

“The authors ruthlessly expose the slavishness to business and pressure groups, the shallow thinking, and the moral irresponsibility of the mandarins of who now dominate the governmental educational establishment. In the place of the bankrupt dogmas that now prevail, this book offers parents, teachers, and students an urgently needed new educational philosophy and agenda that revivifies the grand and distinctively Canadian tradition of education for democratic excellence.”

Thomas L. Pangle,
University of Toronto

“The authors of a new and angry book on the state of Canada’s school system argue that liberal education may well be entering a dark age in which radical and corporate reformers simply unplug 2000 years of accumulated wisdom...The two political scientists seek to focus and provoke debate, and I have no doubt that their book will admirably achieve this end...they carefully identify the meddlers - business advocates, politically correct gurus, educational snake-oil salespeople and technocrats - and then pointedly conclude that their collected and constipated vision of education reduces human beings to “global workers” or “adaptable problem solvers.”

Andrew Nikiforuk
The Globe and Mail

“The book examines the sorry state of secondary and post-secondary institutions and points to the bashing of liberal education as the crux of the problem. Refreshingly, the authors stay away from petty ideological finger-pointing and show tangible problems...In fact, the book takes aim at forces on both the left and the right of the political spectrum as perpetrators of liberal education’s decline...At the conclusion, Emberley and Newell provide us with the tools to effectively judge for ourselves what is and isn’t worthwhile in education. This, in my estimation, is nothing short of revolutionary.”

Mario Carlucci,
The Charletan